Frictional Contact Stress Analysis of Spur Gear by Using Finite Element Method

Spur gear is used to transfer rotary motion between parallel shafts. The simplicity in its design is one of the advantages of the spur gear. However higher frictional force that is accumulated on the gear teeth will influence the spur gear performance. Many previous papers elaborated extensively on the contact stress in the spur gear but few of them gave the details on how friction affects the gear teeth. There are insufficient frictional effect data in the gear and thus should be regarded as an important research parameter. In this paper, the contact stress of spur gear has been evaluated with and without friction by employing the Hertz theory, AGMA standard and finite element method (FEM). The frictionless contact stress result has been validated with both the theoretical methods with minimum deviation. Frictional coefficient range of 0.0 to 0.3 was selected and the corresponding contact stress is directly proportional to the friction coefficient. The work also involves the variation of face width of the gear set under the influence of friction. The contact stress of spur gear was found to be inversely proportional to the face width.